1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to network communication, and in particular, to message forwarding toward a source end node in a converged network environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
A current design trend in high performance computing systems is to reduce power consumption, physical space requirements, management and maintenance by reducing the number of physical connections that must be supported by the computing system. One technique for reducing the number of physical connections required by a computing system is to converge multiple different types of data traffic on a common physical connection. For example, conventional high performance computing systems have communicated with bulk storage (e.g., storage area networks (SAN)) utilizing a first physical connection employing a first communication protocol, such as Fibre Channel, and have additionally communicated with a local or wide area network utilizing a distinct second physical connection employing a second communication protocol, such as Ethernet. In this case, a reduction in the number of physical connections can be achieved by converging storage and network traffic on a single physical connection employing Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), which encapsulates Fibre Channel frames within Ethernet frames. FCoE is defined, for example, by the FC-BB-5 standard promulgated by the T11 Committee of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS), which standard is incorporated herein by reference.
Convergence of multiple types of traffic on a physical connection has the advantage of reducing the number of required physical connections while leveraging the prior development of standards and maintaining compatibility with installed infrastructure. However, network convergence can also lead to difficulty in retaining or implementing desired features of the converged data traffic. The present disclosure addresses one such difficulty by enabling communication of messages, such as congestion notification messages, back to a source end node in a communication network in which the source end node is obscured by the convergence of the data traffic.